


Stalemate

by toujours_nigel



Series: Conditions Best Suited [8]
Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-26
Updated: 2013-03-26
Packaged: 2017-12-06 14:03:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/736502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel





	Stalemate

Ralph woke several times in the night. Once, Laurie, still half-asleep himself, thought he smelled smoke, and later roused to see Ralph silhouetted against the window as he moved the black-outs and strode back to bed, sure-footed in the dark. Laurie himself felt bruised with exhaustion, as though he had just woken from being anaesthetised for an operation—he could not have wandered about the flat even had his leg been up for the work—and he had expected that Ralph would be at least as tired. He had looked as though he was holding himself upright out of sheer bloody-mindedness, and there had been a moment in the beginning when he had leaned his face into the crook of Laurie’s shoulder and shuddered as though pulling himself from iron bands when Laurie had felt awedly tender towards him, had hardly dared to raise a hand to touch his hair for fear of shattering him—to this man he had been ascribing crimes of calculated jealousies. He had thought that Ralph would sleep as he had all their afternoons together, loose of limb and easily gathering Laurie unprotestingly close. But the narrow bed dipped all night as his weight left it, and then there would be the soft sounds of Ralph moving around—the susurration of silk, the smell of smoke.  
  
In the morning he woke to Ralph shaking him by the shoulder and speaking urgently in his ear. “There’s someone at the door, I’m going to make up a bed on the sofa for myself, stay as you are and not one word to the contrary, the landlady’s suspicious here. If anyone asks, you had a pass for the night and I forced you to stay.” Waking too late to stop him, Laurie thought ruefully that there wasn’t a word of a untruth in his instructions—they had slept chaste and curled into themselves, backs turned towards each other. But after all it must look very bad. He debated the merits of dressing and going out to meet their visitor, but his knee twinged badly when he tried to put weight on it: he had treated it rather carelessly, and had had to forgo the possibility of having it medicated. At physiotherapy he would be glared at and asked unanswerable questions, but it had had to be done, and there had even been a kind of grim joy to knowing that nobody else could do the necessary.  
  
He heard the sound of the door closing, and presently Ralph came back and looked at him a long moment before beginning to strip out of his pyjamas. His face in the light looked hardly better than it had the previous night, but there was a perilous kind of peace behind the eyes. The little triangle of tanned skin at his throat was beginning to fade, and the sliver of skin protected by the angle of his hat did not look as shockingly pale. The skin of one shoulder was mottled a vivid plum, the colour of a bruise. He pulled an undershirt over his head and smiled at Laurie. “Hullo, Spuddy.”  
  
“Hullo, Ralph. I've got to get back to the hospital.”  
  
“I haven't forgotten. Will you be in trouble?” There was nothing, Laurie thought, that he could have done if the hospital had decided even to crime him for it, but for all that Ralph's voice had changed to the crispness of impending decision.  
  
“No, Alec managed an overnight pass. I didn't know his last name till yesterday.”  
  
“They're not common currency. Here, let me have a look at that knee; you've bitched it up again.” The first time Ralph had laid healing hands on him, they had barely begun to be reacquainted, he had touched it since—not with growing assurance, which had never been much lacking—but with the ease of intimate knowledge; now it felt suddenly strange. If he had not come when he had, he might never have felt this again.  
  
He said, light-headed with pain and terror, “I doubt it's anything a dose of APC won't fix up. Unless you've liberated some more of those pills from Alec?”  
  
Ralph smiled at him. “I'm afraid I've run out, my dear. Can you stand? It's good that you have physiotherapy today, that shouldn't be allowed to stiffen. Here, I'll help you with that.”  
  
  
  
The drive back to the hospital felt interminable. Laurie, not five minutes in, tried apologizing, and was brushed off with great charm and finality. Before he could make a second attempt, Ralph started in on an anecdote of people Laurie had never met and places he would never visit. With any luck, Ralph still might, if not on his own ship. It lay painfully between them, and Laurie was glad to have the car stop before the hospital.  
  
Ralph handed him out with his usual neatness, and said, “I'll look in on Alec before I go to the station. Unless you want a visit when you're done with your treatment?”  
  
Laurie paused on the verge of saying no, recollected that Mervyn had been clamouring for a visit for days, and that Ralph would take great pride at putting the boy at ease, and said, “If you can manage it.”  
  
“I'm at loose ends today,” Ralph said, and “I'll come find you, I know where the treatment happens. Go on, Spuddy, no use putting it off.”  
  
  
  
Sister said, “Well, Odell, you must not expect to make a habit of this,” and looked after him suspiciously as he limped down the ward. She would have liked very much to rake him over the coals, but the pass had been regular at all points, and Dr. Deacon was a sort of pet of hers.  
  
Mervyn was awake and eager for stories; having covered up Laurie's earlier absence, he felt it his simple right to share vicariously in his adventures. That he was to get a visit, and that from the distant source of his new magazines and books, came as incredible fortune, and Laurie had a sense that the boy was treating it as a polite lie of the species adults usually offered sick children.  
  
  
  
In treatment Miss Haliburton withheld complaints, but Laurie was guiltily aware—how not, since she also withheld puppies, though the bulldog whined hopefully from his basket—that he had not treated himself a fraction as carefully as he should have, and emerged feeling roundly chastised. It was impossible to explain that he had needed the knee more than it needed him, and Laurie wondered whether he should not simply have invented a girlfriend who had had an emergency of some sort. To have invented a sibling had occured to him fleetingly, and he had reasoned that records would undoubtedly show him up for a liar.  
  
Ralph, true to his word, was waiting for him just outside her office. He leaned away from the wall, flexing his hand within the glove, and offered a smile that only looked a little strained at the edges. Laurie wondered, anxiously for a moment, what Alec must have told him, and whether his own desperate ploy had been found out. They fell easily in step, his knee as always eased by the treatment, and Ralph shifted his smile seamlessly from Laurie to first the Sister and then to Mervyn himself, settling in and offering up a new magazine for his perusal.  
  
For Laurie there were letters to be gone through, from his mother and from friends at Oxford, and an envelope which bore his address in Andrew's boyish hand, which he put neatly beneath his pillow at a moment when Ralph was fully occupied with Mervyn. The boy's face was lit up with more outright glee than Laurie had yet seen gracing it, and the two seemed engaged in setting out the plans for a maritime life for him. Ralph would have made a wonderful father, firm and forgiving and entirely willing to be inveigled into moments of boisterous fun; at school he had shown signs of it already with the twirps, and watching him with Mervyn afforded Laurie uncomplicated pleasure. It was easy to think of Ralph as someone's father, as it was difficult to think of most of his circle: Sandy, oddly, one could think of in the same manner, kind and seemingly weak and capable of shocking courage in unexpected ways; he had saved, if not all of them, then at least several, with his heroics with the shovel, and was, if Laurie was any judge, about to be flooded with nurses expressing their gratitude.  
  
The letter from his mother he spent some time steeling himself for: it was her first missive to him as a married woman, and was sure to contain a multiplicity of references to Straike. And it was still easier than even the thought of reading Andrew's letter, with Ralph perched within handsreach, at the foot of Mervyn's bed. He got through it, in the event, by refusing to let the words coalesce into meaning; that would have to be left for a quieter time, when his nerves weren't jangling with the awareness of the quiet smiles and darting glances with which Ralph was punctuating his stories. If he hadn't read the letter himself, Laurie would not have thought it possible that Ralph had come so perilously close to suicide; he recollected now with a deeper knowledge that Ralph had stopped shaving after his sub died, that he had been peculiarly furious with Sandy for attempting suicide over and over, that Alec had spoken on his birthday about Ralph junking parts of himself as he judged them unnecessary. At present he was telling Mervyn a story about Singapore that involved animated gestures and—Laurie had no doubt, having once heard the story himself—swift and strategic editing. If he'd been too stubborn to listen to Alec, those hands would have been stilled, the smile blown into bloody pieces of bone and shattered flesh; if he'd left it another half-hour, left it to Alec to worm out of his shifts and the ward. He'd seen too much death in too short a span to wish it upon anyone and after all, he did love Ralph.  
  
When Mervyn began to drift off to the lulling sound of Ralph's voice, now quietly detailing a voyage to Perth, the man in the bed on his other side shot Laurie a grin. The boy had become something of a pet for the whole ward and Laurie knew he wouldn't be the only one sorry to see him go. Ralph slid neatly off the bed, and paused a moment to tuck him in.  
  
Laurie climbed out of bed and followed him to the door, skirting the beds with a minimum of awkwardness. Just outside, and out of sight of casual onlookers, Ralph said, “You should read it. Nothing's worse than not knowing.” Laurie thought, quite without wanting to, of the neat pile of envelopes awaiting stamps; they'd been gone by the time he'd woken. “Well, my dear, I'll leave you to it. If you can get away tomorrow, Alec'll get news through to me.”  
  
  
  
Laurie offered to feed Mervyn when he woke up and retreated immediately under the onslaught of the Sister's reaction to his imagined insult to hospital protocol regarding meals. It seemed, as he lay flush with happiness and shamming sleep, a natural thing to slip Andrew's letter from under his pillow. 


End file.
